


love letters (of a sort)

by GalaxyOwl



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Epistolary, F/F, Post-Miracle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 17:00:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15393321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyOwl/pseuds/GalaxyOwl
Summary: Demani,You’re asleep right now, and I have a meeting with a contact in fifteen minutes, so I’m not going to be here when you wake up. There’s food in the fridge—a new supply shipment came in last night. I’ll see you this afternoon.Love you,Gray





	love letters (of a sort)

**Author's Note:**

> for fatt femslash week: love letters

Demani,

You’re asleep right now, and I have a meeting with a contact in fifteen minutes, so I’m not going to be here when you wake up. There’s food in the fridge—a new supply shipment came in last night. I’ll see you this afternoon.

Love you,

Gray

***

Gray,

I was going to write back something tongue-in-cheek on here about how I can survive without you for a couple hours just fine, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been sitting here smiling over this note of yours for the past ten minutes at least.

There was a time when I thought we’d never get to here—or, not that we’d never get here but that there was no “here” to get to. When the idea of you and me as anything more than distant letter-writers was not only impossible but impossible to even conceive of. We were agents of the Rapid Evening, and we’d given up our right to this— _I’d_ given up my right to this, to waking up to a partner who’s so used to being there that her absence is the exception rather than the rule. If you’d asked me then, I’d have told you that I’d long since come to terms with that decision. I don’t think I’d have been lying. But now I can’t imagine going back. Not to passively watching, and not to isolation.

Trying to write out this entire letter on post-it notes taped to the fridge in the back room was maybe not the brightest idea I’ve ever had. But what I’m saying is: love you too.

Demani

***

Demani,

I know we were talking not five minutes ago, but I only just now found your response. I hope you understand that I can’t not write something back, at that point.

Believe me when I say that I know what you’re talking about. I was there, too. A lifetime ago, and not that long ago at all.

The situation in the Mirage keeps changing, and I still don’t know if we’re going to make it through this. We have to just keep… pushing through, I guess. Taking things one day at a time. Try to hold the Rapid Evening back, try to keep this whole system from falling out of balance. Try our hardest and if we fail then at least we failed trying, right?

I got kind of off-track there. The point I was actually trying to make is, you’re my one constant. Primary. Demani. I’ll love you to the ends of the galaxy, and all of that. But I think you already know that by now.

Gray

***

Gray,

I had a conversation, today, while you were in the back—maybe you heard it, I don’t know. But I had a conversation with this visitor, a young woman from the NEH. Or, maybe it’s more fair to say “from Earth,” and leave it at that; it didn’t sound like she much self-identifies with the NEH at this point. It’s kind of funny that I do that still—it’s so easy to try to divide people here into easy categories and factions, as if anything is ever that simple.

This woman was telling me about how her and her girlfriend were trying to find a place to settle down, but that they hadn’t agreed on where yet. Gray, you should’ve seen the way this girl lit up when she was talking about her partner. The way she talked, you would think that woman had put the stars in the sky herself.

Her girlfriend’s from the DFS, was the thing, though. She was so anxious as she was telling me about this, like it was some big secret. Not, I think, the fact that these people who have such different pasts were together, but rather just that they were concerned about something as frivolous as, say, what the view would be from their new planetside home.

I keep turning it over in my head, Gray. Her nervous expression, her quiet voice. I told her she’d be welcome here, if she wanted, for as long as she needed to stay. But she just smiled and turned me down. Thanked me for my time. Then she left.

I hope she and her partner find someplace, wherever it winds up being.

Demani

***

Demani,

You’re away this week. Which I say here not because you don’t know that already, but because you may not know, when you find this on your bedside table a week from now, when it is that I was writing this.

It’s the day after you left. I only made it that long. To be fair, there are worse things to do in this scenario then continue to deplete our supply of physical paper-and-ink. It’s what it is, I suppose, isn’t it? In lieu of being able to get a real message through to you halfway across the system, I can write you this, and it’s like you never left.

I was thinking today, about the name we decided on for this place. The Brink. And I know it’s maybe a little bit _too_ on-brand of me to start waxing philosophical about a name that _I_ decided on, but.

I always thought the brink—the precipice we were balanced on—was the moment right before the first Miracle, when it looked as if everything was going to end right there, at least for the Divine Fleet. At least for you and me. But these days I feel like it never ended. Like we’re still, all of us, perched on this edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or maybe that’s not the right metaphor; maybe it’s more like we’re playing tug-of-war with this figurative shoe. I don’t know.

Brink. It’s a good word, a satisfying series of sounds. I could list the formal definitions, if I wanted, but that wouldn’t do either of us all that much good. It’s just strange that it can contain within its multitudes both this fractured moment of uncertainty, and this deep sense of _home_. The Brink is this thing we’ve built, it’s a last-ditch effort, it’s the feeling I got the first time I saw your face, Demani.

So I know it’s selfish of me, but part of me would almost be okay with it never ending.

Gray


End file.
